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We saw Erin Brokovich and then proceeded to block the building of literally everything

These kinds of generalizations are so ridiculous as to be completely useless. You keep saying that we're blocking "everything"... what? Nobody is claiming that we need to stop building (in your words) "literally everything". This is called a "straw man".

But it turns out there's a middle ground between "Mass cancer and death" and "total ban on new things."

Yes, and environmental impact studies move us away from the "mass cancer and death" while still allowing "things" to be built.

what about Datacenters is uniquely bad

- Excessive water consumption which is especially bad in areas that experience droughts

- Excessive electricity consumption which strains power grids which have not had time to adapt (also causing wildly increased bills for local residents)

- Continuous operation which exacerbates the above issues (compared to "factories, malls, golf courses, pools, etc" which largely operate for only a portion of the day)

- More land use, making the nearby land uninhabitable due to noise as well as other environmental impacts for local wildlife

Or do you not like the idea of resource usage at all, even if residential and renewable? Are we afraid of wasting the sun's precious energy? I'm struggling to understand.

I'm struggling to understand where on earth you got this? It seems like you're just inventing arguments to debate against. I never said anything like this.

Thanks for telling me how I think. If we're doing that, let me tell you how you think: you don't care about people and want to pursue profit over human life, and will go to any length to defend a private corporation over the people who have to live with the negative impacts of its poor decisions.

Not sure if you're aware of this, but a large portion of the infrastructure that was built before environmental impact studies existed caused severe health issues for the surrounding communities, including cancer and death. That's why we have environmental impact studies now.

If you were asked, would you have voted to allow the building of your own home, the infrastructure and roads around it, and the businesses whose tax revenue funds your local municipality you suddenly are so concerned about?

If there were proper studies on the environmental and economic impacts, instead of blindly building without due diligence. The issue is that data centers are being built without this kind of analysis, at huge cost to the surrounding communities.

One of the most bizarre contradictions of this current moment is the simultaneous anger at things being expensive and also anger towards building anything.

This seems like you're being purposefully obtuse, given the context in long thread you're replying to. It's not against "building anything", it's data centers which harm the surrounding communities.

But Chatrie found that the geofence was unconstitutional because of the wide dragnet which included people not suspected of crimes, not because those people were in private spaces:

The Court held that police conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they obtained Chatrie's location data, because, as the opinion put it, "an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information."

The analogue with Flock is pretty clear then:

Just as important as the holding is the reasoning: the Court rejected the government's fallback argument that the search was fine because it only pulled a narrow, time-limited slice of a much larger dataset. Once the Fourth Amendment applies, the majority reasoned, it doesn't matter how small a bite investigators took out of an all-encompassing database.

A lot of people in academia are mission driven - they don't care about the money, they care about the application of their work to benefit humanity and don't want to exist as a cog in a private corporation's profits. I think this mentality of "scientists just want to get paid a lot of money" is contributing to the anti-science views that are so pervasive in America these days. Some people are motivated by more than just profit.

Unfortunately, leftists rely on Americans ability to empathize with the plight of the vassal states in the world which have been pillaged and destroyed in service of the most prosperous and advanced societies. It is obvious at this point that Americans do not have empathy and will gladly accept the state of the world as long as they don't have to witness the injustice of it.

Except the defense has shown that the police blocked opening an additional lane even after the protestors specifically requested it for emergency traffic, and in fact blocked more lanes unnecessarily.

Defense attorneys argued that many of the risks to people stuck in traffic could have been mitigated — including the traffic itself — if the median had been moved to open a fourth lane on the southbound side. They said a protester designated to communicate with the CHP specifically asked for that to happen to allow emergency vehicles to access anyone who needed one.

Northbound traffic was also stopped by the CHP as a multitude of emergency vehicles responded to the bridge, which defense attorneys pointed out would have created the same type of risks the prosecution said people were experiencing because of the protesters.

https://localnewsmatters.org/2026/05/29/gaza-protesters-gold...

So he wasn't proven guilty in a court of law, and everything that you're saying is conjecture based on your non-expert opinion? "Guilty until proven innocent," was it?

Guilty until proven innocent

This is a description of your stance on Alex Pretti.

You're looking for https://theyrule.net/

Ngl, this sounds like addiction. You don't have to use the site, man.

Gatestone Institute is an American far-right think tank known for publishing anti-Muslim articles.

The organization has attracted attention for publishing false or inaccurate articles, some of which were shared widely.

The Gatestone Institute has been frequently described as anti-Muslim, regularly publishes false reports to stoke anti-Muslim fears, and has published false stories pertaining to Muslims and Islam.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatestone_Institute

The US and Israel have repeatedly claimed that schools and hospitals are legitimate military targets with no evidence. A highly partisan think tank which is known for putting out misinformation is not a valid source.

If you're going to destroy hospitals and target civilian infrastructure and kill children, you should be accountable on a world stage and provide evidence. Unless you would you accept Iran bombing elementary schools in the US because they claim to have intel that there are terrorists hiding under them?

That PR article doesn't answer the questions, and raises more:

- Why didn't SPD commission an independent study?

- What kinds of crimes were studied? Is this catching jaywalkers or homicides?

- Only mentions arrests. What about convictions? How are victims receiving justice?

- Where's the data and the reproducible methodology?

- How many people were tracked who didn't commit any crime at all?

There's so much wrong with that article that it's hard to come to any verifiable conclusions about the efficacy of the program. And again, doesn't answer any of the original questions.

Doubt that anyone is concerned with a random person catching a portion of your face while they're taking a picture in public. Instead, it's opposition to being tracked over time by a centralized entity like a private company or government agencies.

Such great questions. Maybe we should answer them before building a massive, privately-owned, nationwide surveillance apparatus with taxpayer money.

So you're saying that a technology:

- is trivially defeated by teenagers

- is used by police departments as evidence to legally justify violent raids for property damage

- whose data is mishandled by law enforcement agencies who don't do due diligence

... should have more widespread adoption and support?

The general sentiment in the thread is that this is too powerful a technology in the hands of unqualified law enforcement. In the same way that I don't trust federal law enforcement in the post-Snowden era, I don't trust local law enforcement with mass surveillance tools.

Biased policing means these systems are used to target minorities, activists, and people with "controversial" beliefs: https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/discriminatory...

EXACTLY, thank you! I run an international human trafficking and drug smuggling operation. I know that what I'm doing is good for society:

- It makes me and my partners extremely rich

- It creates jobs for at-risk youth

- It provides products and services that people want

It benefits society! I am a benefit to society! Why can't anyone see this?

I don't, unless you mean people who try to convince me that someone else is my enemy.

I don't have enemies.

Maybe we should leverage all of this supposedly world-changing AI to move on from primitive wars instead of using it to build more weapons. At a certain point, our species will be faced with a choice between maintaining the status quo (climate destruction, mass casualties through violent conflicts, food/water shortages, extinction-level events, etc) or working together to forge a sustainable path forward for the benefit of the species. An argument that this current world order is just how things are and there's nothing to be done but escalate is just a vote for the former.

Palantir's founders and executives are aware of what their tools are designed for and what they enable, and they're proud of their role.

Salesforce, Microsoft, and PostgresSQL contributors aren't bragging about how their products enable lethal military operations.

"We" as a species with common interests like "not eradicating ourselves through violence."

That's a false choice. By investing in weapons instead of diplomacy, we've created this world of tit-for-tat violence. We can dismantle it too, it's not necessary to continue escalating until we exterminate our species.

Many people (myself included) have a lot to say about those companies as well. But their existence doesn't excuse Palantir, the company at the focus of the article that we're discussing in this thread. We're on a tech-focused forum which is probably why you hear more about tech-first companies here like Palantir and Anduril than "legacy" weapons manufacturers.

Palantir's products are not Excel. Palantir's founders and executives are well aware of what their tools are designed for and what they enable, and they're proud of their role.

As far as I know, Microsoft executives don't brag about Excel being used to create a unified "kill chain" [1], nor do they market software intended for targeting for weapons of mass destruction [2], nor do they claim that their products are designed for use in lethal military operations [3].

As much as you'd like to hand-waive away their role, a war profiteer is a war profiteer. IBM also used to just make computers to manage supply chains in WW2; who they sold it to, the purposes it was used for, and why they sold it is still important. Based on interviews, Thiel and Karp are gleeful about their role in the military-industrial complex and embrace it [4], so likening their products to Excel is disingenuous at best.

[1] https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blam...

[3] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Palantir-defends-its-role-in-th...

[4] https://futurism.com/future-society/palantir-ceo-war-crimes

The concern is more with the tools that Palantir creates around the domains they service. They analyze, predict, and shape decisions using unproven technology. Palantir controls insights, models, and outcomes, and given the anti-democratic and frankly unhinged extremist worldviews of the founders, it's highly concerning to allow them to create tools for sensitive and nuanced data that have life or death consequences.

Nobody ever accused these companies of being competent at suppressing the research (which includes third parties btw, not just internal).

Companies do this research for all sorts of reasons (including legal compliance, demonstrating due diligence to regulators, to understand users and improve products, etc etc etc). For example, it's not like Zuck commissioned an internal study to show how they're harming children, more like some internal team was seeking to understand why kids love a certain feature which led them to conclusions that make the company look bad.

To your third point, that research is usually leaked by whistleblowers or conducted by third parties, not because of the altruism of these companies.

Finally, the platforms aren't doing enough and with this court case, it seems like they've persisted in finding ways to hook children because of financial incentives.

The sources cited in this article are a good primer for understanding what these companies are doing: https://www.transparencycoalition.ai/news/meta-suppressed-re...

Christianity is supported because it has shown itself to be the only culture capable to produce working institutions and a rule of law.

I'm really sick of these christian nationalists deciding that their chosen religion is the best thing for humanity and forcing it onto the rest of the world. "Working institutions" and "rule of law" for whom?

Look at he middle east for understanding.

How comically reductive. Would you care to delve into the history of the middle east and of christian/western intervention?

He is someone who plugged his fingers into the power outlett

Children harm themselves by plugging their fingers into power outlets. That's why we teach them not to.